Organ of Alliance Marxist-Leninist (North America)
Volume 1, Issue 4; April-May 2003 $1.00

A L L I A N C E ! A Revolutionary Communist Monthly

Alabaster 5th Millenium Babylonian head Writing cylinders 3000BC Ivory 8th C BC man monkey Oryx

MUSEUM RAVAGED – USA INCITES LOOTING.

Who are the Barbarians? Ask the American Council on Cultural Policy (the ACCP)

The celebrated Indian writer Arundhati Roy wrote these following words to open a condemnation of USA and UK imperialism:

"Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates. How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that ancient civilization."

Arundhati Roy; "The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire"; 4.11.03; http://inthesetimes.com/print.php?id=156_0_1_0

She could not have known how accurate she was to be. For she had stressed both the bomb damage, but also the humiliation. That humiliation came only to be too true, as the deliberate USA policy of humiliation of the peoples of Iraq, was made clear to the world.

Before we write any more on this topic, we should be unequivocally clear that the abomination of this war lies primarily in the needless killing and endless suffering the Iraqis have endured in this shameless war of imperialist aggression. However – we must also state the view that destruction of national pride is a key part of imperialist designs - to reduce a peoples, to servility and to lose faith in their own powers. It is a strategy from time immemorial, and can be found in ancient texts.

What Happened?

But – what happened with the pillaging of the Baghdad museum? In the first place, yet another USA and UK state violation of the Geneva Convention has occurred:

"The Pentagon is culpable, says Ed Keall.. head of the Royal Ontario Museum’s Near Eastern and Asian Civilisations…. They were warned … and are in breach of the Geneva Convention, which state that invaders must protect the national heritage",

Ray Conologue, "Fighting over the Spoils"; Globe and Mail, April 19, 2003, p.R1.

Long before the "War of Shame" actually occurred, the War-Mongers had been alerted already that the land of Iraq was home to some of the world’s most important heritage sites – it was after all, the land where the first recorded writing had taken place in history. Several USA based archaeologists had briefed the War-Mongers where these sites were – and that they would be subject to damage and potential looting. But nothing was done and on April 10^th , the inevitable - happened:

"On Jan. 24 at the Pentagon, a small group of accomplished archeologists and art curators met with Joseph Collins, who reports directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and four other Pentagon officials to talk about how the U.S. military could protect Iraq's cultural and archeological sites from damage and destruction during impending the war in that country. McGuire Gibson, a professor at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, gave the officials a list of 5,000 cultural and archeological sites. First on the list: the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. Gibson recalls he talked to the group about the importance of safeguarding the museum from damage from bombs -- and from looting after the military conflict ended. "I pointed to the museum's location on a map of Baghdad and said: 'It's right here,'" he recalled in an interview. "I asked them to make assurances that they'd make efforts to prevent looting and they said they would. I thought we had assurances, but they didn't pan out." On April 10, a day after the Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed and Baghdad was in the hands of the U.S. military forces, the National Museum of Iraq was ransacked. And American troops did virtually nothing to prevent an historic cultural disaster. "

L. Witt, "The End of Civilization. The Sacking of Iraq's Museums Is Like a 'Lobotomy' of an Entire Culture, Say Art Experts. And They Warned the Pentagon Repeatedly of This Potential Catastrophe Months Before the War," in Salon.com, April 17, 2003:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/04/17/antiquities/index_np.html

On April 5^th, a briefing in Kuwait of the assembled embedded "-in-bed-with-the-military-fascists" journalists were told by US Major Christopher Varhola that:

"The USA military would protect Iraq’s museums from looting, in particular the National Museum of Baghdad".

Ray Conologue, Ibid; p.11.

And what has happened? A whole priceless museum of culture has been pillaged. The scene must be almost indescribable, yet Robert Fisk does a fine job:

"They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete. Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history - only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city…….. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses."

Fisk, Robert: "A civilisation torn to pieces", The Independent, 13 April 2003; http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=396743

Fisk also recalls the people associated to the museum, like the Director of State Board of Antiquity:

"Only a few weeks ago, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities, referred to the museum's contents as "the heritage of the nation". They were, he said, "not just things to see and enjoy - we get strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq". Mr. Ibrahim has vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Mr. Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues are now trying to defend what is left of the country's history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. "We don't want to have guns, but everyone must have them now," he told me. "We have to defend ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against one man - so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?"

Fisk, Robert: "A civilisation torn to pieces", Ibid.

Although Fisk is not a communist, he is a rare commodity – an honest journalist working for the "Western press" in the Middle East. It is therefore sad to see his incorrect assertion that:

"The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilization."

Fisk, Ibid.

Fisk is quite wrong in this assessment. We can be so categorical because it is clearly emerging that the USA ruling classes had decided to wreak havoc on the culture of the country – no doubt hoping to destroy its potential to build an anti-imperialist movement. Destroy the pride of a people and you have destroyed its will to live – as a nation. But, more than one imperialist power has found to its cost that this does not happen.

Could it have been prevented?

The tone and content of many of the Western media reports, has been that the looting taking place in Iraq is a spontaneous reaction to the poverty and deprivation of the Saddam Hussein years. However this benign view, is in sharp contradiction to both objective reports, and to some obvious facts.

For instance, the enormous military presence and fire-power of the USA and the UK in the cities was simply not deployed as a guard and protection for key sites – hospitals, water and electric utilities, markets, etc. Leave side the museum, where it is also clear that the USA army refused to intervene to protect the cultural heritage of museums and repositories of ancient manuscripts in the libraries. It seems obvious that if they could protect the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Oil, that it was purely for their own strategic reasons that they have allowed the looting to proceed unabated. As Irwin Finkel, curator at the British Museum says:

"Anybody with any intelligence would have posted guards. It’s too obvious for words".

Globe & Mail; 19 April, 2003; p. R1.

All this puts the Rumsfeld comments that the looting has "been exaggerated", and "freedom is messy" – into a perspective of deliberate and wanton destruction of the Iraqi dignity, human rights, and cultural heritage.

We will try to answer the critical question: "Why?" shortly.

The following eye-witness account, tells a very different story from the slavish American media. It comes from a Swedish paper, which reports the comments of Mr.Khaled Baroumi, a student in Sweden who went home to Iraq on a humanitarian mission:

"Khaled Bayomi looks a bit surprised when he looks at the American officer on TV regret that they don't have any resources to stop the looting in Baghdad. "I happened to be there just as the US forces told people to commence looting. … I had visited a few friends that live in a worn-down area just beyond the Haifa Avenue, on the west bank of the Tigris River. It was April 8 and the fighting was so heavy I couldn't make it over to the other side of the river. On the afternoon it became perfectly quit, and four American tanks pulled up in position on the outskirts of the slum area. From these tanks we heard anxious calls in Arabic, which told the population to come closer. During the morning everybody that tried to cross the streets had been fired upon. But during this strange silence people eventually became curious. After three-quarters of an hour the first Baghdad citizens dared to come forward. At that moment the US solders shot two Sudanese guards, who were posted in front of a local administrative building, on the other side of the Haifa Avenue. I was just 300 meters away when the guards where murdered. Then they shot the building entrance to pieces, and their Arabic translators in the tanks told people to run for grabs inside the building. Rumours spread rapidly and the house was cleaned out. Moments later tanks broke down the doors to the Justice Department, residing in the neighbouring building, and the looting was carried on to there. I was standing in a big crowd of civilians that saw all this together with me. They did not take any part in the looting, but were to afraid to take any action against it. Many of them had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning looting spread to the Museum of Modern Art, which lies another 500 meters to the north. There was also two crowds in place, one that was looting and another one that disgracefully saw it happen."

Question: ‘Do you mean to say that it was the US troops that initiated the looting?’

Answer: "Absolutely. The lack of scenes of joy had the US forces in need of images on Iraqi's who in different ways demonstrated their disgust with Saddam's regime."

Question: "But people in Baghdad tore down a big statue of Saddam?"

Answer: "They did? It was a US tank that did this, close to the hotel where all the journalists live. Until noon on the 9th of April, I didn't see a single torn picture of Saddam anywhere. If people had wanted to turn over statues they could have gone for some of the many smaller ones, without the help of an American tank. Had this been a political uproar then people would have turned over statues first and looted afterwards."

"US FORCES ENCOURAGE LOOTING", By Ole Rothenborg Sweden's largest circulation daily, Dagens Nyheter, Friday, April 11, 2003 http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1435&a=129852&previousRenderType=1

What materially was lost?

There were 170,000 separate objects, These ranged form skeletal remains of Neanderthal man (45,000 years ago); to alabaster figures from Tell Es-Sawwan (6^th Millenium); painted pottery from Eridu (4000 BC); impressive early Islamic manuscripts and handcarts form the Abbasid, Seljuk, Ottoman eras; more than 3,000 tablets of inscribed clay on mathematics, literature, administration and legal tables; a Sumerian bison headed harp in gold and precious stones, the so-called Mona Lisa of Nimrud (750 BC); gigantic statues of ancient times . etc.

The illustrations we show, are detailed in a very comprehensive (although in black & white) web-site, that we recommend at:

Of TheArtNewspaper.com – which can be found at: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/iraqmus/index.html

Inscribed Duck weight Lion Hunt 3000 BC Nimrud 'Mona Lisa'

TheArtNewspaper says this:

"All the illustrations are from the only detailed catalogue of the museum, Treasures of the Iraq Museum by Dr Faraj Basmachi, published in Baghdad in 1975/6. Nevertheless, the images in the Treasures of the Iraq Museum represent many of the most important objects from the collection, which numbers some 170,000 pieces."

Why Did The USA and the UK "close its eyes"?

The primary reason is undoubtedly imperialist arrogance, with its goal to degrade the pride of the Iraqi peoples.
But a close second reason, is that old answer to so many questions concerning the historical "Whys" concerning imperialism? Avarice.

The American Council on Cultural Policy (the ACCP) has openly stated it wants the right to obtain these Iraqi treasures by import legally:

"It would satisfy the hunger for this material" ACCP President Ashton Hawkins, former general counsel for the Metropolitan Museum in New York. (p.R11 Globe and Mail 13 April); and another member of the ACCP - Professor John Merryman of Stanford says: "The best solution was to prevent the museum being plundered.. But now that’s happened, and it was predictable, there is a possibility of picking up the pieces".

(Ray Conologue Ibid).

The New York Metropolitan has long been vexed at the British Museum’s collection of Iraqi treasures pillaged by the British archeologists such as Leonard Wooley. Ironically, an older vintage British adventurer-imperialist – Gertrude Bell was kinder to Iraqi and Arab views. She is credited with founding the National Museum, and passing an export ban on treasures. It is a ban that apparently, the New York Met has chafed about.

Eleanor Robson, a cuneiform expert at Oxford University Museum also refers to the "hidden agenda" of the ACCP:

"If you are interested in Biblical history, you will find that most of the written Biblical record comes not form Israel, but form Iraq. So people are really interested in this material. Sadly, they don’t see it as belonging to the Iraqi nation".

Ray Conologue, Ibid.

She points out that the ACCP has many members who belong to the right-wing fundamentalist Christian agenda, saying:

"they think the objects belong to them because they’re connected with the Biblical past. Such attitudes, "are not mainstream in Europe, but in America they influence the government".

Ray Conologue, Ibid.

    It seems inescapable that the imperialists have justified their historic designation as Robber Barons. Most probably some items were "commissioned" by rich art connoisseurs. It is significant for example, that certain key items were looted. Duplicates were simply ignored, and the "looters-professional thieves" opened museum vaults with keys, and used glass cutters with great skill.
                    Conclusion:
    Undoubtedly, in the short term UNESCO will not succeed in its stated goals, of preventing these treasures from being spirited to the West. In the long term, this will not crush the Iraqi [peoples quest for national liberation. The working classes of a future Marxist-Leninist governments in the West, will have to confront the legacies of cultural pillaging.
End